If you didn’t know, BioWare’s latest and greatest title, Anthem, is out and I like it.
Sometimes.
Parts of it.
What’s maddening is that even with all of Anthem’s faults and bugs, I still think about playing it, which makes me want to play it, and then I do play it. Eventually after a couple of hours I feel frustrated or confused and I stop, but I keep fucking coming back, like I’m on some kind of drug or something. You see, I want my Javelin to be cool and I want to comprehend the story and I want to hope there’s more diversity in the end game gameplay. I want to love Anthem. Maybe it’s a pacing issue? When I’m in the heat of a firefight with rando’s the game feels great. I’m currently playing as the Storm class, which is basically a mage, so I’m wrecking shit with lightning and other elements. I like getting new gear and breaking down old gear and components (passive abilities added to slots in your suit), but sometimes the game can feel like a real slog man. You go from fast-paced battles to flying to the next mission objective which can take a bit of time since you can’t fly forever because of your flight limitation. You often end up touching down on the ground, waiting a few seconds for your suit to cool down, and then taking flight again. At first it wasn’t so bad, but after the 50th time? Yeah, that shit can get annoying. I have installed a component called a ‘Heatsink’ which makes my cooling system more efficient so I can fly longer, but it’s not quite enough.
Oh, and there are still some pretty bad bugs. I mean bad. I like to run missions in quick play on hard difficulty in order to level much faster and usually things go fine. That is, until I discovered my first mission breaking bug. I jumped into quick play and the game loaded me into a scenario where our objective was to ‘Hunt the Beast’. Okay sure, easy enough. We swiftly defeated all the beasts in the area, but the game wouldn’t register that we completed it. We scoured the small objective area to make sure, but there were definitely no beasts around. You wanna know what’s more annoying than that? Loading into that exact same mission instance almost ten times! That’s right—somehow I kept getting loaded into this shit mission that I wasn’t able to complete. A quick Google search showed that I wasn’t alone and this bug has been submitted to BioWare and EA. Super. I ran into another bug during the Fortress of Dawn mission that ended up respawning infinite Dominion enemies without my squad’s knowledge. We played for almost an hour until I asked my wife to do a quick Google search which brought up this reddit thread full of others experiencing our exact same issue. Fortunately we were able to wipe and progress on the first try, but the most irritating part is that once we spawned back in we beat the whole mission in literally five minutes because we were right at the end. Needless to say, I was a bit pissed off.
And yet even with all these god awful bugs, I still like the game. I used some Best Buy credit and managed to grab the title for a cool $30 which has helped to ease my frustrations a bit. I find the shooting and looting fun and satisfying, but the free play definitely needs more public events, enemy encounters, and mission variety. The game also needs to explain lore to you directly because it’s doing a shit job at the moment with NPC’s mentioning events and items that are told to the player though readable lore scattered throughout the game world and the home hub. These are two big gripes I had with Destiny that were fixed back like four or five years ago. Here’s a brief rundown of random thoughts I’ve had or things I’ve noticed in my first week of playing.
- area’s are more open than some people seem to think
- movement through the main hub town is faster, but definitely still not fast enough at all
- the gameplay is in third person but you enter first person when in town and while talking to the townsfolk which feels jarring
- framerate can chug on one x—especially when heavy elemental and particle effects are on screen
- maybe there should be a 1440p or 1080p option for the X so framerates can hit a solid 30
- like others, confusing story terms have driven me to search wikis to comprehend what the hell is going on since NPCs mention events and names only explained to the player through the lore in journal entries
- finding public events that aren’t in your immediate vicinity can be difficult—I usually just look for two or more gamertags in the same area
- I can’t set my own fucking marker on the map anywhere I want?!
- trying to solo a public event so I can satisfy some quest objective and then dying because no one is around is frustrating
- anthem has very basic human character customization, but I wish it was deeper and I wish I saw my character more frequently
- item drops aren’t satisfying or fun because the weapons I started with look the same as the legendary and epic items I have now, only with higher stat boosts. I want beautiful and killer designs like Destiny has
- there aren’t enough javelin cosmetic options available at launch that I can see
- I hate this game
- I like this game
- I’m still having fun
- I’m going to play more of it right now
